


Calibrations

by Theoroark



Series: Dark Room [6]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Team Talon (Overwatch), Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:34:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24719119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Theoroark/pseuds/Theoroark
Summary: Doomfist and his engineering expertise, or, Akande Ogundimu gets called a nerd a whole bunch of times. Featuring Gabe having friends, a Spiderbyte couples costume, & Ashe working on a motorcycle in a tank top.
Relationships: Background Sombra | Olivia Colomar/Widowmaker | Amélie Lacroix, Doomfist: The Successor | Akande Ogundimu & Reaper | Gabriel Reyes, Doomfist: The Successor | Akande Ogundimu & Widowmaker | Amélie Lacroix, Elizabeth Caledonia Ashe/Doomfist: The Successor | Akande Ogundimu
Series: Dark Room [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1340431
Comments: 20
Kudos: 30





	Calibrations

At first, Akande’s conversation with Gabriel is all business. He’s still surging with adrenaline from breaking out of prison, and he wants to study Gabriel’s reactions, see how he’s changed since Akande saw him last. Gabriel’s voice drips with barely-controlled anger when Akande asks about Morrison and Amari, and while Akande can’t trust that anger, he trusts Gabriel’s successes against other Overwatch agents. For now. 

Akande charts a course to an atelier near Monaco and settles into a seat in the ship's bay. Gabriel hovers awkwardly across from him– almost literally hovers. Akande tries to keep his gaze focused on his holopad. He’s been informed about O’Deorain’s work. He’s not wholly pleased with it. For all her rhetoric about evolution, O’Deorain favors biological solutions, and becomes evasive when Akande broaches the topic of cybernetics. 

It’s something he should have predicted, really. The natural selection O’Deorain embraces supposes success at birth, written in the genome. Cybernetics undermine that, grant success to the canny and open-minded, no matter what their genes say. If culture offers evolutionary advantage, then Moira’s misanthropy will have been maladaptive. And so she can’t admit their usefulness. Even when in Gabriel’s case, cybernetics would surely mean less pain. 

For Gabriel, at least. Akande remembers the desiccated corpses that littered the Helix facility, and the terrified remaining soldiers gawping at them. Akande shakes his head. He’ll have to speak with Gabriel about cybernetics later, when he knows more. Maybe use it as a bargaining chip. 

The train of thought succeeds in turning his focus from Gabriel, at least. For six years, he’s only been able to read his engineering blogs. Now he can finally email the_real_cyberpunk some of the Ogundimu design schematics that have been on their wishlist for years. He comments on an Atlas News feature on his family to let them know the noun form is “prosthesis,” not “prosthetic.” He buys some 3D printing blueprints he’s been pining for the past six years. 

Akande looks out the ship’s window. They’re over the Meditteranean, and will be in Monaco soon. But the last item on his to-do list is the most important. He fills out the Adawe Genius grant nomination form and submits the 10,000 naira fee. He uses an anonymous account but appends it with his cell number, so the people he BCC’s will know it’s not a joke. Finally, he places a call to his undergrad advisor. When she stops cursing him out, he asks her to vote for Efi Oladele when the foundation board makes its decision. 

“A rival of Vialli’s?” Gabriel asks when Akande hangs up. Akande stares at him blankly. 

“No? Vialli doesn’t have a foothold in Numbani.”

“I mean, Gabrielle did work outside of there.” Akande doesn’t necessarily like remembering that his closest ally was friends with the woman who put him in prison. It seems Gabriel doesn’t either, because he quickly pivots to, “What was that about, then?”

“The Adawe Genius Grant,” Akande says. It’s hard to tell with the mask, but Akande intuits that Gabriel is staring at him blankly. “There was someone I thought deserved it, who wasn’t likely to be nominated through traditional channels. I’m glad I got out in time to get it done.”

“Which scientist is this? I didn’t know we had any R&D people in Numbani.”

It’s Akande’s turn to stare blankly. “She’s not one of ours,” he says, when he finally gets it. “She’s twelve.”

“She’s a twelve year old weapons designer?!”

“No! She does robotics!”

“I have no idea what’s going on here,” Gabriel says. 

“I– look.” Akande clicks on a bookmark and shows Gabriel botbuilder11’s page. “She does incredible work with inexpensive parts and open-source coding, and she works with the city in mind. If she actually had funding, she could help Numbani incalculably. And frankly, my Junie is backordered for months, and I’ve been dying to break it down and look into how the projection mechanism works–“

“Oh,” Gabriel says. “Right. I forgot.” Akande frowns. 

“Forgot what?”

“That you’re a giant fucking nerd.”

Akande lowers his holopad. All of a sudden, he’s incredibly annoyed with Gabriel’s mask. He doesn’t know if Gabriel’s smiling, rolling his eyes, gritting his teeth, or anything. He doesn’t know how Gabriel feels about him. For some reason, it bothers him more now, than when they were talking about life and death and their job.

It occurs to Akande that for the past six years he’s been in prison, he’s been very alone. He’s had so little contact with the people he cares about, so little that most of those people have slipped away. Akande enjoys a challenge. But he enjoys it more when someone’s fighting with him, at his side.

Akande doesn’t know what Gabriel feels about him. But he knows how he feels about Gabriel, and he knows it’s not something to be ashamed of. So Akande just laughs. And after a moment, Gabriel does too.

“I’ve missed you,” Gabriel says. “Board meeting’s are fucking insufferable, when I can’t make fun of Maximilien and Moira with you later. I’m glad you’re back.”

“I’m glad to be back,” Akande tells him.

-

Akande and Gabriel dispose of Vialli during the masquerade in Rome. Gabriel whips out elaborate costumes for all of them, red velvet and a feather bustier and a purple that looks perfect on Akande. They’re very good for making a dramatic reentrance to Talon, for making Maximilien’s forehead dots dim slightly as Akande walks past. Akande is grateful. 

And a little threatened. Akande can quite safely say he’s the most stylish person in Talon. He still gets invitations to fashion weeks, even with his criminal record. He and Lacroix have a standing shopping trip in Milan once a month. He was featured in Vogue five times. But Gabriel seems to be very good at costumes. And Halloween is coming up. 

Akande likes to know his enemies, know what their strengths are, so he can outflank them. After about an hour of scrolling through Gabriel’s defunct facebook page, looking at photos from Overwatch parties, Akande figures it out. Gabriel’s costumes are all textiles– maybe a mask or two, but nothing more diverse than that. They’re impressive, very classically Halloween in creative ways. But Akande knows he can do better. 

Akande goes old school monster, because he feels like that will get under Gabriel’s skin the most. He considers Frankenstein’s Monster, with sparking electrodes, but decides against it. He’ll still be wearing this thing to the Talon Halloween party. He doesn’t want to set off any fire alarms before Gabriel’s gotten a good look. He nixes the wolfman as well, because he can’t quite imagine how to contour fur to his abs. 

Eventually, he finds the perfect costume. He starts this endeavor in August. It’s a long wait for him to finally step into the converted ballroom in Rome at the end of October. Dancing red lights, sheets of metal, and curls of barbed wire cover the place, making it look like the site of an apocalypse. Most of the Talon personnel have made minimal effort on their costumes, apparently focusing mainly on straddling the line between dressing for a work event and dressing to get laid. 

Lacroix seems to be an exception. She’s wearing black leggings with a visible logo on the back, a blue turtleneck with an arrow drawn on paper taped to the front, and elf ears. Akande imagines she threw the costume together today. Her efforts are instead poured into appearing as unapproachable as possible, no matter how drunk a potential fraternizer may be. She relaxes when Akande walks up to her, closing off the possibility of making a new friend. 

“What are you even supposed to be?” Akande asks. Lacroix rolls her eyes. 

“And a happy Halloween to you too.” She points to the paper arrow on her chest. “I’m Spock. From the Star Trek.”

“Spock,” Akande repeats. 

“It works better when I’m with Sombra,” Lacroix says. She looks over her shoulder, and Akande follows her gaze. Sombra is by the open bar, waving as hard as she can for the bartender’s attention. She matches Lacroix only in the loosest sense of the term. Her black leggings are logoless and tucked into mod platform boots. Her yellow top has the silver emblem sewn in, along with a keyhole cutout Akande can’t seem to recall Kirk ever wearing. Akande doubts it’s intentional, but Sombra puts on a very Kirk-like smirk as she finally gets her drinks. 

“And you,” Lacroix says, turning her attention back to Akande. “You’re the, ah…” She snaps her fingers, trying to summon the right words. “I don’t know it in English, but you know. The old movie monster.”

“The Swamp Thing,” Akande supplies. 

“Right.” Lacroix squints in the low light. “Are those actual scales? Not makeup?” 

Akande holds his arm up for closer inspection. “I used a model for cybernetic grafts,” he tells her, “but I didn’t code them for biotranslation or anything. And that freed up space for aesthetic detailing, like this scale pattern.” 

“Mhmm.” Lacroix leans back, a small smile on her face. Akande narrows his eyes. Which is a bit difficult, with the all-black contacts he’s wearing.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she says. “It just seems like a lot of effort for a costume of a monster no one cares about.”

“That’s a little interesting, coming from the woman dressed like a character from a series that’s been off the air for almost a century.”

“This was Sombra’s idea,” Lacroix says. “I can’t help that my girlfriend’s a nerd.”

Akande scoffs and looks over to the bar. Sombra’s been waylaid talking to Mauga. She’s gesturing to the emblem on her costume, going into some explanation. Mauga’s plastered smile indicates he wasn’t fully aware of what he signed up for. Lacroix’s not wrong. 

It’s more than that, of course. Akande’s worked with Sombra a few times now and while she’s infuriating– always chasing her own agenda, always determined to unearth his– she’s smart. Smart in a way that’s familiar to him. He’s seen her run repairs on her cybernetics and she’s quick and she uses bargain bin tools on her impossibly advanced gear. Some of it’s stolen from Overwatch, yes, but even that, Sombra’s improved on. Akande spent much of his adult life working in cybernetics and even he’s not sure how Sombra does all the things she does. 

Sombra breaks away from Mauga and makes eye contact with Akande when she does. For a moment, she looks exasperated. Then the smirk’s back. She pushes her way back to Widow and gives her a drink. 

“Your costume makes you look like you smell bad,” Sombra informs Akande.

“And a happy Halloween to you too,” he says. Widow takes a long sip of her drink. Akande thinks it might just be wine in a cocktail glass.

“Reyes will be impressed,” Widow says. Both women watch him carefully for his reaction. Akande smiles blandly. 

“That’s nice,” he says. “What did he go as?”

“He didn’t,” Sombra says. 

“What? What do you mean?”

“I mean, he didn’t come here.”

Akande frowns. “I thought this was his favorite holiday.”

“Why do you think that?” Sombra asks. Akande ignores her and turns to Lacroix.

“Did he say anything to you about a mission? About working tonight?”

“No,” Lacroix says. She hesitates for a moment, then asks, “Do you want to check on him?”

Akande looks around. He likes parties, he likes dancing, he hasn’t even gotten a drink yet. It seems silly to have spent all this energy on a costume just for a couple people to see it. But as he considers staying, he’s finding those people are the main ones he cares about. 

“Yes,” Akande says. “Maybe we should.”

Next to Lacroix, Sombra sighs and projects a screen from her palm. She taps quickly on it and brushes it away fast, but Akande makes out what looks like the floor plan to the Rome base.

“He’s still in his quarters,” Sombra says. “Let me get something for the road, and then we can go.”

“Do that,” Akande says. “I need to get some things, too.”

Akande hears the muffled sounds of shrieks and horror music when he knocks on Gabriel’s door. It’s a while before Gabriel opens it and when he does, he looks about as shocked as whatever poor teen just got mangled in his movie.

“What are you all doing here?” Gabriel asks. Akande holds up his box of cybernetic materials. Lacroix holds up a bottle of wine.

“Since you failed this year’s mission,” Akande says, “we thought we’d help you get a start on next years.”

Gabriel furrows his brow. The only light in his quarters is the static TV screen behind him, but Akande can see he looks tired. His red eyes are dull, there are patches of his skin missing. With a pang, he realizes he should have brought food for Gabriel. He’d send Sombra to break into O’Deorain’s lab to get some but– and he hates to admit it– he wants Sombra here to help.

“What mission?” Gabriel asks.

“Halloween costume,” Sombra supplies. She shoulders her way past Akande and starts placing holograms of designs on Gabriel’s kitchen table. “Akande was Facebook stalking you and saw you love those. So we want to help you make one. For next year.”

Akande closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. When he opens them, Gabriel’s wearing a small smile. 

“Your costume is pretty good,” Gabriel tells him. He steps aside, and Akande and Lacroix enter his apartment. Akande sets the box on the table and begins to pull out materials. 

“You know how to sew, don’t you?” Akande asks Gabriel. Gabriel nods. “And Sombra, you can make sure the code for the different pieces match up. I’ll get the pieces prepared, and…”

They all turn to Lacroix. She sighs. “What do you nerds need me to do?” she asks.

They work the whole night. Lacroix makes a feeble stab at helping Sombra, then decides her job will be to sit at the door, look through the peephole, and tell them which Talon agent is going home with whom. By the time the sun’s rising and Akande’s on the verge of nodding off in his chair, they have maybe Gabriel’s boots done.

“We’ll have to work on this more later,” Akande tells him. Gabriel nods.

“I’d like that,” Gabriel says, in a small voice.

-

Akande’s life reorients itself, as much as it can when he’s chasing chaos. He goes to Milan with Lacroix. He indulges Gabriel’s request for elaborate costumes on missions. He teases out the smallest bits of information from Sombra on her cybernetics. And as he expands Talon’s agenda into the Americas, he meets Ashe.

B.O.B.’s eyes go into happy chevrons when he opens the door and sees Akande. “Liz is in the garage,” B.O.B. signs. 

He pauses to see if Akande needs him to fingerspell “garage,” but Akande’s been studying ASL on flights to and from missions. And Elizabeth spends a lot of time in the garage. “Let’s go,” Akande signs back and B.O.B. nods, pleased, and walks him through the lawn. 

Elizabeth is wrapped around her motorbike when they come in. Akande’s rarely seen her more angry than after McCree stole her bike, the one she’d had since she was a kid. This new one is just a couple months old but Elizabeth has been tinkering with it non-stop, trying to place as many fingerprints on it as possible. 

Her hair is pulled back in a precarious looking bun– Elizabeth’s asymmetrical bob is chic, but occasionally inconvenient. She’s wearing a white tank top and jeans, both of which have been decimated with oil and grease stains. She’s focused on the bike and Akande’s focused on how good she looks like this, so they both start when B.O.B. raps his fingers on his cheek in an Omnic approximation of clearing his throat. 

“Akande!” Elizabeth says. She struggles to disentangle herself from the machinery, but stops when Akande holds up a hand. “Thanks for bringin’ him here,” Elizabeth tells B.O.B. 

Whatever B.O.B. signs is too fluid and colloquial for Akande to make out, but Elizabeth responds, “You got it”– out loud, for Akande’s benefit. B.O.B. nods, waves, and closes the garage door behind him. 

“I’ll be done soon,” Elizabeth says. She raises a hand up to wipe her forehead and then lowers it, remembering that it’s covered in grease. “Sorry for making you wait around.”

“Don’t apologize,” Akande says. He leans against Elizabeth’s workbench. “I like watching you work.” Elizabeth looks down at her chest in a tank top. Akande rolls his eyes. “I like learning about mechanics.”

“You don’t have to pretend to be interested in this shit.”

“I’m not pretending,” Akande says. “I studied engineering in college.”

Elizabeth looks up at him, surprised. “Why didn’t I know that before?”

“Academic degrees rarely seem to be relevant resume items in our line of work.”

Elizabeth snorts. “Fair enough.” She glances over Akande’s shoulder, to the workbench of tools he’s leaning against. “You want to help me out, then?”

“I didn’t study vehicle engineering,” Akande admits. “Just… a bit of it. Informally.”

“How informally?”

“A buddy let me help her awork on her car, a few years back.”

Elizabeth’s lips curl into a smile. “‘Let you’?”

“I think she was just indulging me, because I wanted to learn so bad.” Elizabeth laughs. She leans forward when she does, and some of her hair escapes its haphazard binding. Akande smiles. “Don’t worry. I’m content to watch.”

“I’ll let you know if I need someone to hold a bucket or something,” Elizabeth says. She turns her attention back to the bike’s propulsors, examining the spot she just soldered. “What kinda engineering did you study, then?”

“Cybernetic.”

Elizabeth shakes her head. “Shoulda guessed that. Though you know. My family never made me major in… oil?”

“Geology?” Akande offers. Elizabeth shrugs. “In any case, they didn’t make me. I wanted to.”

“Really?” Elizabeth looks up from her work again. She pushes her stray hair out of her face, making a face at the fruitless effort and the grease smudge she leaves. “Why? Figured you always had, you know,” she waves a hand over him, “big CEO energy. Not…”

“Nerd energy?” Akande offers. Elizabeth hesitates. 

“I mean, you know, I’m doin’ this shit too. And I guess like– you did martial arts tournaments, right? Guess I want to know exactly how many talents my boyfriend has. How impressed I should be.”

Akande has been in business for a while, so he’s been trained to be suspicious of flattery. But the way Elizabeth says it– a teasing tone but a genuine look in her eyes– cuts through his defenses effortlessly. He walks over, kneels down, and kisses her, uncaring of the grease on the floor and her face. 

“Undergrad, it was because I knew knowing the product I was selling would give me an edge over my siblings and cousins,” Akande says. “And would show the aunts and uncles who thought I was just a jock that I was serious. And then, after the accident–“

Elizabeth’s eyes flick down to his arm. She takes his prosthetic hand in her organic one. “I learned that defining human as purely flesh and bone was foolish,” Akande says calmly. “And that there were many foolish people in the world. Who wanted to ignore how the ingenuity it takes to make is what we should be proudest of. Who wanted to be praised for how willfully weak and ignorant they were, rejecting advances because they were made of metal.”

Elizabeth is quiet for a moment, just holding his hand, interlacing their fingers. Then she says, “They were dipshits.”

Akande laughs. “They are.” Elizabeth takes off her gloves and kisses him, resting her clean hands on the back of his neck. Akande feels his tension dissolve under just her touch. 

“You want to help me tune the front battery?” Elizabeth asks, when they pull apart. 

“I told you, I'm happy just watching.” Elizabeth looks unconvinced. “Tell you what, I’ll help you test drive it later.”

That seems to make Elizabeth quite satisfied. “Deal,” she says. Then her focus turns fully back to her work. Akande settles down at a stool behind the workbench. 

He is content watching Elizabeth work for a while. But soon she moves under the bike, and he can’t see what she’s doing. Akande turns his attention to the bench in front of him. There are wrenches, screwdrivers, plasma injectors– standard equipment for working on a motorcycle, as near as he can tell. But on the far end of the table, he sees a different toolset. A more familiar one. 

Akande walks over to the sheet metal and wires. Elizabeth told him an Omnic in her gang was a good roboticist, that they work with B.O.B. for most of his upgrades. But she must do some repairs on her own. And since it’s Elizabeth, she’s prepared for those basic repairs with the most high end robotic tools and components. 

Akande turns a laser saw over in his hands. He looks over his shoulder at Elizabeth. He’s told her things he’s never told anyone else, and she’s listened without judgment. She loves the parts of him that others hate. She’s always honest with him, always trusts him to handle any issue they have head-on. He loves her. 

And just last month, she was complaining about Jesse fucking McCree and his bullshit robot arm, how can the asshole act like he’s the better shot when he’s got fuckin’ aim assist on. And now Akande knows she won’t judge him for his solution. 

Akande sits down at the bench and begins to work. He’s quickly absorbed in his work, pulling up references from his university notes and Efi’s blog. Elizabeth must be focused too, because it’s a couple hours before she squeezes his shoulder and asks, “What’re you doing?”

Akande holds the half-completed cybernetic brace up. “To help stabilize your aim,” he tells her. “It syncs up with your heart rate and adjusts to mitigate any micromovements non-invasively. A lot of Talon snipers have them, and it’s improved their lethality.”

Elizabeth stares for a moment, her eyes wide. Then she wraps her arms around Akande and kisses his cheek. “You’re such a fucking nerd,” she tells him. “You’re incredible.”

Akande smiles and tightens a screw on one of the panels. 

**Author's Note:**

> I’m [@tacticalgrandma](https://twitter.com/tacticalgrandma) on twitter if you want to talk to me there!
> 
> Thank you so much for reading, and any comments or kudos would mean the world to me 💜


End file.
